Jamie Washington, 14, right, of Montclair, hugs Claudette Colvin prior to the start of a Women's History Month Program at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Newark. ARISTIDE ECONOMOPOULOS

Everyone knows Rosa Parks — we hope.

She was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala, in 1955 when black people were routinely treated as second-class citizens and had no rights. When she put her foot down, 40,000 blacks wouldn’t ride city buses for 381 days during a boycott that ushered in the civil rights movement with the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. leading the way.

That’s the popular narrative when stories are told. Most people have never heard of Claudette Colvin, a forgotten footnote in history.

She played a major role in the 1955 boycott as well, but her contribution goes largely unnoticed. Colvin was 15 years old when she refused to give up her seat, and she did it nine months before Parks.

What makes Colvin’s part so significant is that her defiance led the to the federal lawsuit that ended the Montgomery boycott and segregation on buses a year later in that city, the state of Alabama and the country.

She was among four women — the others were Susie McDonald, Aurelia Browder and Mary Louise Smith — who had been mistreated on buses. They agreed to be plaintiffs in Browder vs. Gayle, the case challenging city and state segregation laws on transportation.

Over the years, Colvin has not talked much about her obscurity, but she opened up Thursday night during a Women’s History Month program in Newark.

"We beat them down by staying off the buses, but they don’t tell about the legal reasons, how the Supreme Court went against states’ rights,’’ she said. "They picked the wrong day to pick on me."

Colvin told her story to a full house and standing ovations at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the People’s Organization for Progress and elected officials honored her for taking a stance that eventually helped strike down segregation laws across the country.

"Even though her role has been documented in a number of books and historical archives, the fact remains that her name is not in the popular consciousness,’’ said Larry Hamm, chairman of the Newark organization.

Fred Gray, the veteran civil rights attorney who filed the federal lawsuit, said Colvin can never be left out of any discussion when it comes to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Gray, who also represented Parks and King, said Colvin gave black leadership the "moral courage’’ to take on segregation.

"If she had not done it, she wouldn’t have been arrested, Martin Luther King Jr. would not have been introduced to the community, there would have been no bus boycott, and the whole history of the civil rights movement may have been different,’’ said Gray, speaking from his home in Tuskegee, Ala. He has a law office there and another one in Montgomery.

Colvin remembers getting out early from high school that day, March 2, 1955, when she wouldn’t get out of her seat. Riding the bus home was one of the few times, she said, that blacks and whites interacted. Schools were separate, churches, too. Neighborhoods were divided by railroad tracks, a highway or street sign.

The only other occasions on which blacks and whites saw each other was at work or shopping for groceries or clothes, which blacks couldn’t try on in a department store. "You had to hold it up to the outline of your body or hold it up to your back and hope it fit when you got it home,’’ Colvin said.

After school let out, Colvin said, a white woman got on the bus, but the only available seat was in the black section across from her and friends. She said the driver told them to get up, because whites couldn’t sit across from blacks. Colvin’s friends got up, but she didn’t.

A traffic cop boarded and Colvin sat firm, telling him the same thing.

Colvin said she is not sure what got into her that day. She knew she was right, fired up from learning about black heroes in school during Negro History Week, which is now known as Black History Month.

When the traffic cop got nowhere with her, Colvin said the driver flagged down two more officers several blocks later.

"I was even more defiant,’’ she said.

She repeated her stance, and stayed seated.

"I couldn’t move because history had me glued to the seat,’’ Colvin said. "It felt like Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner’s Truth’s hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder.’’

Colvin said the officers dragged her off the bus and put her in the city jail, not the facility for juveniles.

Gray said he wanted to use her as the test case to challenge city and state segregation laws. It didn’t happen at first, he said, because black leadership wanted to wait, thinking the time wasn’t right.

Nine months later on Dec. 1, 1955, Parks was arrested and the boycott started. Gray represented Parks, but said her arrest was for disorderly conduct, not violating segregation laws for which Colvin had been charged. He went back to Colvin and she agreed to be part of the lawsuit he filed Feb. 1, 1956. The federal court in Alabama sided with Gray on June 19, and the U.S. Supreme Court did, too, in December of the same year.

Colvin is not upset that she’s a little-known heroine, because she said something was bound to happen back then.

"Anything could have played out,’’ she said. "It just happened to be me.’’

She left Montgomery in the 1960s, moving to New York City where she made her life, retiring as a nurse’s assistant in 2004.